A carburetor is a device that combines air and fuel for an internal combustion engine in the proper proportion for combustion. Sometimes it is shortened to carbohydrates in the United Kingdom and North America or carby in Australia. Carburete or carburize (and therefore carburetion or carburetion, respectively) is to mix the air and fuel or equip (a motor) with a carburetor for that purpose. A burette or burette is a device for measuring liquids accurately.Carburetors have largely been supplanted in the automotive industry and, to a lesser extent, in aviation by fuel injection. They are still common in small engines for lawn mowers, rototillers and other equipment.
The carburetor works according to the Bernoulli principle: the faster the air moves, the lower its static pressure and the higher its dynamic pressure. The accelerator (accelerator) link does not directly control the flow of liquid fuel. Instead, it drives the carburetor mechanisms that measure the air flow that is introduced into the engine. The speed of this flow, and therefore its pressure, determines the amount of fuel that enters the air stream.
When carburetors are used in aircraft with piston engines, special designs and features are needed to avoid fuel starvation during the inverted flight. Later engines used an early form of fuel injection known as a pressurized carburetor.
Most carburetted production engines, unlike injected engines, have a single carburetor and an intake manifold that divides and transports the air and fuel mixture to the intake valves, although some engines (such as motorcycle engines) use multiple carburetors in divided heads. Multiple carburetor engines were also common improvements for the modification of engines in the USA. UU From the 1950s to the mid-1960s, as well as during the following decade of high-performance muscle cars, feeding the different chambers of the engine's intake manifold.
Older engines used upstream carburetors, where air enters below the carburetor and exits at the top. This had the advantage of never flooding the engine, as any drop of liquid fuel would fall off the carburetor instead of falling into the intake manifold; it also lent itself to the use of an oil bath air filter, where a group of oil under a mesh element below the carburetor is sucked into the mesh and air is drawn through the oil-covered mesh; This was an effective system at a time when paper air filters did not exist.
Beginning in the late 1930s, top-down carburetors were the most popular type for automotive use in the United States. In Europe, side-draft carburetors replaced the downdraft as free space in the engine bay decreased and the use of the SU-type carburetor (and similar units from other manufacturers) increased. Some small airplane engines propelled by propellers still use the upstream carburetor design. The external motor carburetors are typically side draft, as they must be stacked one on top of the other to feed the cylinders into a vertically oriented cylinder block.
The main disadvantage of basing the operation of a carburetor on the Bernoulli Principle is that, being a dynamic fluid device, the pressure reduction in a Venturi tends to be proportional to the square of the intake air velocity. The fuel jets are much smaller and are limited mainly by the viscosity, so the fuel flow tends to be proportional to the pressure difference. Therefore, jets sized for maximum power tend to starve the engine at lower speed and partial acceleration. The most common is that this has been corrected by the use of multiple jets. In SU and other mobile jet carburetors, it was corrected by varying the size of the jet. For cold start, a different principle was used in multi-jet carburetors. A flow resistance valve called throttle, similar to the throttle valve, was placed upstream of the main jet to reduce the inlet pressure and suck additional fuel from the jets.